If, as said before, the Word of
God is our Sword, then united prayer and fasting is our atom
bomb. It is the most powerful spiritual weapon that God has
given to us. Most
Christians have no idea just how powerful a spiritual weapon
united prayer and fasting can be. They have little if anything in
the way of teaching or experience to inform them. Of course, they
all believe, more or less, that "prayer changes things"
and "there is power in prayer". But most Christians
have no concrete understanding of just how much prayer can change
things. They have no effective understanding of just how much
power there really is in prayer. And especially not about mass
prayer and fasting. The purpose of this page is to give the readers some idea of the power that they
can wield by fasting and praying in unity; by
Biblical example and by personal testimony.

The Biblical Basis

In Matthew 18:19 & 20, Jesus
made a statement that is the key to understanding the Prayer
Wars concept:

"Assuredly,
I say to you that if any two of you agree on earth
concerning anything that they ask, it will be done for
them by My Father in heaven. For where two or three are
gathered in My name, I am there in the midst of
them."

The full
significance of this has seldom been understood. As was said in
the "Why
Should We Pray"
page, God has given us the Kingdom, in the sense of His authority
to rule. We do our ruling through prayer, and it is in that sense
we are kings, as in Revelation 1:6. It is because of this that we
can get our prayers answered. We have authority with God. But as
individuals, our authority is limited. Our full potential is only really
unleashed when we pray in unity. We have unlimited power in
prayer only when we pray in agreement with other Christians.

As stated in the BABEL
RISING! page,
humans are created in God's image collectively, if anything, more
than individually. That is why our creativity increases
dramatically when we act in unity. The same principle applies to
prayer. As Christians, we are the Body of Christ. We achieve our
full effectiveness as Christians when we act as a Body. And the
way in which we can most overtly and directly do so is when we
unite in prayer and fasting.

Agree With
God

This agreement must
also be agreement with God. You can't be praying against God's
will and expect to have power in prayer. If you do pray against God's will, you better hope that
your prayers don't get
answered. When God grants a petition contrary to His will, as He
sometimes does, He does it as chastisement. A terrible example of
this is found in Numbers 11, where the people of Israel literally
cried for meat, in a way that was blatant rejection of God's will
(He had already provided manna). He sent the meat - and with it a
plague!

Real
Agreement

Understand that the
unity must be complete and real for this to take effect. The
Christians who are praying can't just be agreeing with their
lips; they must be agreeing with their hearts. There are several
Biblical examples of cases where people united in prayer, often
accompanied by fasting, in circumstances that make it clear that
the agreement was from the heart, with dramatic
results.

Biblical
Examples:

One of the examples
is the story of Esther. Threatened with extermination as a result
of Haman's plot, the Jews fasted in unity. Although for unknown
reasons the Book of Esther doesn't say they prayed, we can assume
they did, or perhaps God accepted their only fasting as prayer.
Either way, the result was the Haman got hanged on his own
gallows. Far from being exterminated, the Jews were allowed to
exterminate their enemies. And to this day the Jews celebrate the
Feast of Purim in remembrance of that miracle.

Another example was
the miraculous release of Peter from prison, followed by the
hideous death of Herod in Acts 12. Here, the fasting isn't
mentioned, but it can be assumed, because the Scripture indicates
that the Church held a prayer vigil for him. Herod had already
killed James the Elder, brother of John, so there was no question
about what he planned for Peter. So the Church prayed, and their
commitment to it implies that they also fasted while they were
praying. Peter was freed. Herod died. The deliverance granted was
complete.

A third, and more
important example, is Pentecost. Again, fasting isn't mentioned
but may be assumed. We get a clue to this in the words in Acts
2:1, in the words, "They
were all with one accord..." (NKJV). This is one of the places where
the Bible does lose something in translation. The Greek word
translated, "with
one accord" is¢omqumadon, transliterated
"homothumadon" and its true meaning is far stronger than
"with
one accord". In fact, there are really no
English words that fully express it, but "in
the same passion" would be more like
it. Since by Jewish reckoning, Pentecost began at sunset, it
follows logically that on Pentecost morning the Christians had
been together in prayer and fasting all night. With passionate
agreement they had been seeking the gift the Lord had promised.
And the Holy Spirit fell.

The Greatest Example

Perhaps
the best example in the Bible of a "Prayer War" is the
story of Jehoshaphat's victory in II Chronicles 20. This story is
well known, but there are several factors that must be looked at
in understanding why he got the answer he received. For one
thing, when he heard about the invading armies, Jehoshaphat
proclaimed a fast and called a national prayer meeting
first. He didn't even take the time to consider his options. He
went straight to the Lord with united prayer and fasting. And
here, or course, it is quite plain that both prayer and fasting
happened. And more than that, everyone did it, and with agreement
that, obviously, due to the circumstances, came from the heart.
There is one other point: It was prayer in accordance with God's
will. In fact, Jehoshaphat held God responsible for the situation
on the basis of His Word. As we know, the Lord accepted the
responsibility, with the words, "...the
battle belongs to the Lord...". It is commonly
said that Jehoshaphat won the battle without having to fight. In
a matter of speaking, however, he did fight and win a battle. He
fought and won a Prayer War!

Numbers Do Matter

One
of the biggest lies relative to Christian Ministry that is
bandied about by Christians is the idea the "numbers don't
matter". You can't prove that from the Scriptures! There are
multiple references that indicate that numbers do matter, and in
fact matter very much. And numbers matter in particular when it
comes to Christians praying in unity. The Bible makes it clear
that prayers offered by Christians praying in unity are usually far more
effective than prayers offered by individual Christians.

This
is not to say that God does not sometimes give dramatic answers
to the prayers of single Prayer Warriors. Of course, He does, as
we know from the story of Elijah (I Kings 18:20-39). We know
that his prayers brought a 3 1/2 year drought down on Israel, and
then just as miraculously brought fire on the altar and
ended the drought (I Kings 18). But answers of that scale
coming in response to the prayers of a single person are rare.
Large scale, dramatic answers are more frequently the result of
many Christians praying in unity.

There
is a little known Biblical principle that suggests that our power in prayer multiplies as our
numbers increase. This principle, as shown in the Pentateuch, is
applied to Israel at war with its enemies. The key verses are
Leviticus 26:7 & 8, reinforced Deuteronomy 32:10

"Five
of you shall chase a hundred, and a hundred of you shall put ten
thousand to flight."

Note
that a hundred putting ten thousand to flight requires five times the relative
power of five chasing a hundred.

A
principle of applying Old Testament doctrine to Christian living is that what
applied to the Israelites materially in Old Testament times applies to
Christians spiritually in New Testament times. So what applied to them in terms
of material warfare applies to us in terms of spiritual warfare. Understand that
when we pray, real warfare is going on in the spiritual realm. We can't see it,
but it is happening.

Of course, because
we can't see the warfare happening, we don't really understand
just exactly what is happening. There is only one example in the
entire Bible that gives us a clue. It is in the story of Daniel
during his three week fast in Daniel 10, in verses 12-12 & 20-21. It seems that the
Archangel Gabriel was trying to get through to him with the
answer to his prayer, but the "prince of the kingdom of
Persia", apparently a demonic power, was holding him back.
In that case, Daniel's persistence brought the answer. We can
assume that there are demonic powers working to hold back the
answers to all our prayers. And the Old Testament principle
suggests that we can drive those powers away when we pray in
unity.

Applying
this Old Testament spiritual principle to prayer, we find that if
we multiply our numbers by 20, again, we multiply our relative
power in prayer by five. This happens to be the beginning of what is called, in
mathematics, a geometric or exponential progression. In such progressions, the
final sums increase quickly as the multiplications are done. We wouldn't have to do the
multiplication many times before our relative power in prayer
would be greater than all the power of Satan. Consider the
following table, which extends this just three more steps forward
and one step back:

Prayer Warriors

Can Chase

Relative Power

1

5

5

5

100

20

100

10,000

100

2000

1,000,000

500

40,000

100,000,000

2500

800,000

10,000,000,000

12,500

Notice that when 800,000
Christians pray in unity, each one has 2,500 times more
relative power than he does when praying alone. Notice also that
the final "Can Chase" number is greater than the
present human population of the earth! This suggests that a mere
800,000 Christians fasting and praying in real unity, and living
in obedience to God otherwise, could exercise spiritual control over this
planet. In theory, this should be easy to achieve. There are supposed to be
about 300,000,000 Born Again Christians in the world. Even a few thousand could really make a
difference.

The Beginning Of
"Prayer Wars"

The concept began to form in
this writer's mind back in the mid 1970's, when he read a book
entitled "Shaping History Through Prayer and Fasting"
by Derek Prince. Incidentally, this book is still available from Derek
Prince and costs only about $5.00. (Derek Prince also offers an excellent book on fasting.)
It is recommended that every member of the Prayer Network get a copy and read
it. The book presents a doctrine of mass prayer and fasting basically identical
to what is said here. It also gives a number
of testimonies of incidents when Derek Prince saw this principle work. When this
writer read the book, he considered it the most anointed thing he had ever read
outside the Bible. He thought the idea sounded right, but had no experience to
confirm it. Then, in 1976, in the space of a few months, the Lord gave him two
experiences that showed that this works.

100 Hours of Prayer For
America

In the summer of 1976 the
Democratic Party held its national convention at Madison Square
Garden in New York City. For those not familiar with American
politics, the Democratic Party is one of our two biggest
national political parties. The national conventions, held every four
years by both major parties, are the meetings in which the
candidates for President of the United States for the Fall
election are chosen. That was the year that Jimmy Carter was
nominated to be the Democratic candidate. Again, for those not
familiar with it, Madison Square Garden is the best
known indoor sports arena in the United States.

The NYPD feared that there
would be riots like those that happened in connection with the Democratic
Convention in Chicago in 1968. Those riots where the worst
incidents of political violence in the United States since the
Second World War. So the Police took all sorts of measures to try to
see that they kept tight control of everything that happened in
the area.

A few months before the
Convention, the dynamic young pastor of an on-fire church in New
York City got the idea to have a public, 100 hour prayer meeting
outside Madison Square Garden while the Convention was going on.
His church was not able to get permission to do it right outside
the Garden, but permission was obtained to use a spot just across
7th Avenue. On that site, the church (including yours truly)
built a beautiful pavilion which was topped by a banner reading
"100 Hours of Prayer For America". Then, during the
whole time that the Convention was in progress, Christians (again
including yours truly) sat in full view of the public and prayed
in four hour shifts around the clock. Several of us got to share
our testimonies on TV news. A number of people got saved, and the
church picked up a number of new members. But that was just icing
on the cake.

The most obvious and publicly
significant result was that the violence the police feared never
happened. Instead, during the time the Convention was going on, a
supernatural peace fell on New York City that was so tangible
that even the secular press noticed it. The crime rate for the
whole city dropped during that time. For 4 days, New York City
experienced a mini-millennium. There has never been anything like
it since. It's just too bad that the "100 Hours..."
event could not have been turned into a long-term movement at the
time. If it had been, we might now be living in a much different
world.

The "Moon"
Rally At Yankee Stadium

For those not familiar with it,
there is a pseudo-Christian cult in the United States called the
Unification Church. It's founder was a false christ, a Korean
who calls himself Rev. Sun Myung Moon, and his followers are popularly
referred to as "Moonies". In the 1970's this cult was
making a very high-profile effort to convert the entire United
States, and New York City in particular, to belief in Rev. Moon.
The peak of this effort was a rally that was held at Yankee
Stadium in August, 1976. It was Rev. Moon's plan and expectation
that the success of the rally would give the Unification Church
spiritual dominance of the Greater New York area.

The rally was the most heavily
promoted event in the history of the City. There were posters put
up advertising the rally everywhere that it was possible to do
so. You could not go anywhere on the streets of New York City
without being offered free tickets to the rally. The promotion
was so heavy that even the secular mass media, which is usually
jaded to big promotions in New York, issued public complaints
about it because it was becoming such a nuisance. It was
clearly Moon's plan to get so many people to come that he would
absolutely overflow the Stadium.

Christian Opposition

Meanwhile, there were a number
of Christian activists (again, including yours truly) who took
action against the "Moon" rally. We organized an ad hoc group called
"Christians United For Jesus As Lord" and made plans to
oppose the "Moonies". We held seminars to train
people to witness to Moonies. We had literature printed up that
was deliberately designed to resemble Moonie literature, with the
intention of making it easier to get people to accept it. (See Matthew 10:16.) The literature contrasted Moon's teachings
unfavorably with those of Jesus, to show that Moon was not
teaching the true Gospel. We made careful plans to surround the
Stadium with Christians handing out the literature, to the point
that it would be impossible for anyone to get into the Stadium
without it being offered to them. Because we thought that Moon
would overflow the Stadium, we planned a Gospel concert to be
staged in a park across the street from the Stadium while the
rally was going on. And last but not least, we got over 2000
Christians to pledge to pray in support for our campaign.

A Prophecy

One other thing we briefly
considered was doing something to overtly disrupt the rally. But
a message was given to us by prophetic utterance to the effect
that we could get ourselves a bad name if we did that, and that
we should leave the physical disruption to the Lord. The idea was
dropped. And, wow, did the Lord do some physical disruption!

God's Disruptions

The rally was supposed to start
at 7:00 PM. But about 5:00 PM, a brief thunderstorm came over the
City. It soaked the city and the Stadium and then cleared off
quickly. It caused us no problem with carrying out our plans,
but, wow, did it mess up the Moonies! As stated, they had planned
to overflow the Stadium. The thunderstorm dropped the attendance
from the expected overflow to only about a third of the Stadium's
capacity. Many of them were people who had been bussed in from
outside the City by the Moonies, and who had no last-minute choice but to be
there. Some of them were us, Christians (again, including yours
truly) who had gone inside to pray. But that wasn't all. God had
even more disruption planned.

Because of the low turn out, the
Moonies were desperate to get people into the Stadium. So they
ordered the Stadium guards to let in anyone who wanted to come
in, whether they had tickets or not. This, unfortunately for the
Moonies, included street gangs from the South Bronx. They didn't
like the Moonies any better than we did, but they had a different
way of expressing it. Meanwhile, the Moonies had been bossing the
Stadium guards around in a way that was rude and disrespectful.
So when the gangs started beating up and mugging the Moonies, and
throwing smoke bombs onto the Stadium field, the guards just
looked the other way. The event ended with the police coming in
like an army and clearing the place out.

Meanwhile, our literature
distribution and the concert in the park had been carried out as planned.
But at the end, we had a confrontation with a street gang that
had been tampering with our wiring. This climaxed with a face-off
in which a bunch of unarmed Christians (once again, including
yours truly - he had left the Stadium when he saw what the gangs
were doing) standing toe - to - toe with a gang of hoodlums armed
with knives, clubs and chains. For a few seconds, the situation
was very tense. Then, with no violence having occurred, the gang
just suddenly turned en masse and
walked away. A few moments later, the Police swept through the
park in force and the crisis was over.

It is this writer's
understanding that several Moonies were killed that night. A few
Christians were hurt, but only one seriously, and none were
killed. The rally was such a disaster for the Moonies that they
have never tried anything like that in the New York area again,
and only once since anywhere else that this writer knows of, and
that too was a flop. This writer has been told by ex-Moonies that
Rev. Moon calls that rally his crucifixion. It doomed the
Unification Church's efforts to do a spiritual takeover on the
United States. The cult survives, but with a much lower profile,
and has become more of a business than a religion.

One thing that really impressed
this writer while he was at the rally was a spiritual, but very
concrete perception that he received to the effect that there was
a spiritual battle going on there, and God was right there
fighting along with us. This was a perception impossible to describe in
words but nevertheless so real and tangible that it stopped just
short of being a vision. This was spiritual warfare on a scale of
tangibility that this writer had never seen before and has not
seen since. It was a vivid demonstration of the power that is
available to Christians when they act, and especially pray, in
unity.

This writer has since realized
that this was in fact an unusual outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Unlike what we
usually think of as an outpouring of the Spirit, the purpose of this one was to
stop sin, particularly the large-scale deception that the rally represented. The
same kind of thing happened in several of the Biblical examples described above;
an outpouring of the Holy Spirit to stop serious sin.

The unfortunate thing is that
after the rally, the movement fell apart. No one seemed to be
interested in keeping it going. If it had, we could probably have
completely destroyed the Unification Church. And then maybe we
could have turned our efforts to other targets. We could have had
real "Prayer Wars" then, and maybe we could have
brought about the real revival that people keep talking about but
that still hasn't happened.

Imprecatory Prayer

The word above is something you
may never heard, but it is a valid, and widely recognized
Christian theological term. The word "imprecatory" is
derived from "imprecation", which is a synonym for
"curse". It is the word for prayer that attacks
and seeks to destroy its object. It is, in fact, the Christian
equivalent of putting a curse on something. There are many
Biblical examples of it, especially in the Book of Psalms. The
prayer that was offered in relation to the Moon Rally was
in part imprecatory prayer. It is highly effective prayer for
stopping evil, and for that reason is something that every
Christian should learn to do. It will bring about the kind of outpouring of the
Holy Spirit mentioned above.

But understand one thing about it:
This kind of prayer must never be done with the intent of harming anyone. The
furthest we can go in that direction as Christians is to pray for
justice. In some cases, such as the death of Herod in Acts 12,
the destruction of a person or people may well be the result, but
we must not consciously seek it (See Luke 9:54-56). We can and should pray
for the end of the evil we are attacking, and pray for the
forgiveness, and salvation, of those who are involved in it.
That's what we did against the Moonies.

In this Prayer Network, we
should pray against all the teaching that is setting Christians
up for a terrible surprise, and pray for the Christians who are
doing it to repent. We should pray that Christians will be open
to receiving the Message of this Ministry.

It is assumed that some of the
readers will want to put the principles thus presented into practice. Further
guidelines for this will be presented in the following page,